Many businesses and organizations offer services to consumers and other clientele remotely. While a growing portion of these services are becoming automated, human interaction is often preferred (and sometimes necessary) for more difficult or complex cases. Naturally, many businesses and organizations employ human representatives to provide (technical) support and/or information to inquiring consumers and other interested parties regarding products and/or services. To handle large volumes of requests, a typical approach is to use one or more contact centers staffed by human agents. Many individualized contact centers are centralized to provide sufficient space and resources for many agents working simultaneously. For example, a larger contact center may support hundreds or thousands of workstations in a single building or campus of buildings. In that manner, maintenance and installation of all of the infrastructure (e.g., computers, workstation cubicle, etc.) is centralized.
These contact centers typically handle the large volumes of service or fulfillment requests by telephone (or communication technologies that simulate a telephonic communication). Typically, agents will answer calls in the order they are received, and when the number of available agents is surpassed by the number of pending calls, a chronological queue is formed that agents may respond to whenever available (e.g., a previous call is completed).
A popular example of a contact center is an inbound contact center that manages incoming calls to provide services to incoming callers. For example, an inbound contact center may provide support to complete a sale, handle issues with or questions regarding products (e.g., installation instructions, warranty service, etc.), handle calls related to services (e.g., banking, collections, police, fire, alarm, etc.), and other similar types of services. Another example of a contact center is an outbound contact center that initiates calls. An outbound contact center may provide telemarketing for a product or service, enable the solicitation of charitable or political donations, provide debt collection services, perform polling or market research, etc.
A contact center may be operated by the business or organization associated with the product or service, or a third party employed to provide customer support. The contact center may represent a third party client, wherein the agent handles calls from customers on behalf of the third party client. As such, the agent may be authorized to access privileged client information using the client's databases. For example, the client may be a banking institution and the agent is handling a call to help a customer determine their account balance. In such instances, the agent can access the customer's personal data controlled by the banking institution to provide an account balance.
However, there are instances where the agent is accessing privileged customer information when there is no legitimate need, or is accessing the information for nefarious purposes. That is, while a contact center agent inherently has authorized access to personal and identifiable information, the agent is generally empowered only to use this access on a need to access basis. However, without active monitoring and user access control, not only may the agent be gathering critical personal information through unauthorized access, but that information may be later used to commit additional fraud (e.g., applying for credit, making purchase transactions, etc.).